Prosperity or Manichean struggle?

12 December 2007 By Martin Hutchinson

The former NY mayor s record and policies offer tight spending controls and fiscal discipline. His ideas on health and education also sound cheap and effective. His temperament and foreign policy views could however damage his economic record through international adventurism.

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Rudolf Giuliani wants to preserve the Bush tax cuts and index the Alternative Minimum Tax to inflation. He also favours taxdeferred savings accounts to encourage saving, which would reduce the US balance of payments deficit.

He wants to introduce competition into health insurance by allowing people to buy across state boundaries. He also wants to introduce competition into education, through vouchers or otherwise. He also favours cutting Congressional earmark spending, through a combination of executive and legislative action, and wants a lineitem veto. However he has come out in favour of ethanol subsidies and of only gradual abolition of agriculture subsidies. He favours reducing the federal workforce by 20%.

He does not favour a cap and trade system of carbon emission permits, because of its effect on prices. He wants to expand nuclear energy aggressively and increase drilling in North America, including the Alaskan wilderness. He is aggressively in favour of free trade, both through multilateral and bilateral agreements.

Giuliani wants to maintain the US military presence Iraq, and favours an aggressive proIsrael foreign policy generally; his advisers include several prominent neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz, Mark Levin, Stephen Rosen and Daniel Pipes.

With reporting by Elizabeth Eldridge.

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With reporting by Elizabeth Eldridge.

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